Seattle Business | Story by Teresa Kenney and Leslie Helm | March 2018

The chief medical officer of UW Medicine and the VP for medical affairs at University of Washington is this year’s Lifetime Achievement Award winner.

Dr. Carlos Pellegrini grew up in a small, agricultural town in Argentina. It was there that he developed an interest in medicine — and with good reason. The town had only two physicians. One was his mother, the other his father.

“For many, many years, all I saw was the care that my mother and my father provided to the town and the vicinity,” Pellegrini recalls. “I worked with them. I witnessed what they did. I accompanied my mother and my father on their rounds through the town and to the homes of the people.”

His parents were primary care physicians, but in his first year of medical school, Pellegrini had the opportunity to work with a surgeon and decided to go into the field of surgery. He left Argentina in 1975 during the country’s so-called “Dirty War.” MORE